Film Catalogue:

Films about the Sho’ah / Holocaust

As I already wrote about in my introductory post, I’m only including Holocaust films which got all the way under my skin. There were a lot of films made in the nineties and noughties which got a lot of hype, but which missed the mark in my opinion, so I’m not including notable films like Schindler’s List, The Pianist and Life is Beautiful, among others. They’re not at all bad films, and obviously you can include them if you want. It’s a very very personal choice, and there’s no reason that the films that resonate for me have to resonate with everyone else. There are also a few quite bad films (looking at you, The Boy In the Striped Pajamas), which only deserve mention for how badly they fail at the subject.

Not all of the films on this list are about the Holocaust itself. Three of them are about the echos of those events, which - even as the last criminals and their victims pass away - still do of course resonate in the madness of today’s Middle East. Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (based on the novel of the same name) was one of the first films to investigate the psychology of a Holocaust survivor, and I suppose one of the first that I saw, along perhaps with Sophie’s Choice, which I haven’t included on the list, but again not because I thought it was a bad movie. Maybe I’ll include it after watching again.

The memories depicted in The Pawnbroker and others are cynically exploited by some (if you look at few of my posts you won’t need to try too hard to guess who I mean) to justify impunity, but these are of course memories nonetheless which we can’t pretend to be irrelevant to the prickly psychology of Israelis as a people. Plan A is a very recently made film which talks about the little known true story of a band of Holocaust survivors who organised to take systematic revenge against the German people in the years between the end of the War and the establishment of Israel. I wasn’t actually expecting it to be as good as it turned out to be. Well worth checking out.

Walk On Water is the THIRD Eytan Fox film which finds itself on two lists. That guy must be onto something. Of course it’s true that every other Israeli film might somehow or other reference the Holocaust, but here once again Fox has the special knack of plugging the external issue (or rather, in this case the deeply felt historical issue) directly into contemporary Israeli existence, and that is why the film belongs on both the “normal” list and this far from normal list.